This is the epic story of the universe and our place in it, from 13.8 billion years ago to the remote future.
David Christian is a distinguished professor in modern history at Macquarie University in Australia and the co-founder, with Bill Gates, of The Big History Project, which has built a free online syllabus on the history of the universe that unites different disciplines and is taught in schools all over the world. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Oxford and is a member of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and the Royal Holland Society of Sciences and Humanities. He has given keynote talks at conferences all over the world, including Davos and TED, where his talk 'The history of our world in 18 minutes' has been viewed over seven million times.
If you read one book this year, make it this one
*Fareed Zakaria, CNN*
A journey through billions of years that nails home the point: Life
is a miracle ... [A] remarkably cogent and compelling history of
everything
*Washington Post*
Rather like the Big Bang, the book is awe-inspiring. The processes
it describes are all familiar, but I'd never seen them explained
with such clarity and verve ... Superb
*The Times*
[Origin Story is] long-haul science with wit and oomph
*Nature*
Christian tells this story very well, providing, in effect, a short
course in modern science. This is a brief history of the universe,
and an excellent one
*Wall Street Journal*
I have long been a fan of David Christian. In Origin Story, he
elegantly weaves evidence and insights from many scientific and
historical disciplines into a single, accessible historical
narrative
*Bill Gates*
In Origin Story, David Christian has found a spectacular way to use
history to put order in the entire set of our knowledge about the
world. This is a wonderful achievement
*author of Seven Brief Lessons on Physics and The Order of
Time*
Origin Story is a majestic distillation of our current
understanding of the birth of the universe, of the solar system, of
the oceans, of mountains and minerals, of all life on earth and of
the driving dynamics of human culture and achievement. All of this
in just over 300 pages of captivating prose that weaves together
innumerable insights from the sciences, arts and humanities. With
fascinating ideas on every page and the page turning energy of a
good thriller, this is a landmark work that comes at a time when it
has never been more important for humanity to have a clearer, more
informed understanding of our place on earth and of the earth's
place in the cosmos. A spellbinding synthesis
*educator and bestselling author of The Element and You, Your Child
and School*
A remarkable book that puts us self-important humans in our proper
place in the cosmos, yet also explains why the story of human
culture and knowledge - what Christian calls collective learning -
matters for understanding our present world and shaping its
future
*Merry Wiesner-Hanks, President of the World History Association*
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